https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=X2sdLIHFPZk
Job is a good man and God thinks so, and so does Satan. And Satan is invited by God to have a few words with him and says, I bet you that I can destroy the faith of your good man Job. And God says, yeah, I don’t think so. Have at her, buddy. And so Job loses everything and in the most painful possible manner. And what he does, as far as I can tell, is that he uses that internal guide of conscience, which was now, say, allied with the voice of God in some sense, against these terrible external forces that are conspiring to bring him down, right? Because his wife dies. The children will die. Children die. The cat will die, he’s covered in boils. Yeah, and his friends are making fun of him because they think he must have done something to deserve this, right? So he’s like taken to the bottom of reality. But he refuses to lose faith. Now, you might say, and this is where the story, I think, transcends something like mere rationality, but we can argue about that. You might say that the logical consequence, the logical conclusion from that misadventure is that Job has every rational reason to shake his fist at the sky and curse God, right? But he doesn’t. He maintains faith in the goodness of being despite the fact that he’s suffering dreadfully. Yeah. And despite what the voice from the whirlwind says to him, which is the least comforting thing that the voice could say, which is who are you to question the Lord thy God? Right, right, but this is, see, this is such an interesting issue here because I’ve watched people in the deep throes of misery, and I can tell you that one of the things that will make misery hell is ingratitude. And so part of the story of Job seems to me to be an injunction, and that is that no matter what happens to you, and that means in some sense, no matter the facts at hand, that you are called upon never to lose faith in the essential goodness of being, right? To conduct yourself as if, what would you say? The cosmos itself is well-structured despite the evidence that happens to be being presented to you within the confines of your life. And I think that’s the same as, I think that’s the same as the practice of gratitude. Well, I’d agree, by the way, bringing that to a rather maybe not obvious segue, but we were also talking last night about the fact that I saw you discussed recently a question of euthanasia and the way in which the Canadian authorities have been doing this. I mentioned to you that some years ago, I went to speak with euthanasia doctors and the patients in Belgium and the Netherlands, they’re very advanced on this. I wrote several long essays on the subject. It’s a horrible subject to dwell on, of course, but actually one of the reasons why I’ve always remained exceptionally suspicious of legalized dying. I have, as we all have, friends who you think at the end, I wish suffering could just stop. So I recognize that that, do you want it to be in the hands of the government or any more in the hands of doctors than it already is, let alone in the hands of the family or anything? I’m not sure about that. Allow the crossover of physical suffering to be equated with mental suffering and you start putting down depressed youths as they are on the continent. Or an example of being given recently is a poor- And they’re moving towards that in Canada. Absolutely. I mean, there’s this poor girl who survived the Brussels airport attack. She saw most of her classmates blown up. Her life didn’t really recover and she was put down with euthanasia by the Belgian state last year at the age of, I think, 24. Now, apart from the insanity of a society that will not, out of principle, execute the perpetrator of an attack, but will kill a victim, apart from the insanity of that and all that we know about the genuinely slippery slope in this area, one of the instincts I realized I had that I just couldn’t let go of was that there was something fundamental about us as human beings that means that it is deeply ungrateful to what we have to give it up even a minute earlier than you have to. And that, you know, in the end, I quite often revert to literature, but I think it’s Gloucester who says in King Lear, man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither. And that actually endurance, endurance of birth, endurance of death is part of the cycle. But there is something, but the resentment you feel, for instance, when somebody commits suicide and people around, somebody who commits suicide, very often do feel resentment as well as deep guilt, is partly you’ve broken the pact at a fundamental level. You’ve made all of us see something we didn’t wish to see or concede something we didn’t need to see. And left us powerless in your wake. And left us powerless. And anyhow, I mean, it’s sort of- And that’s all independent of whether or not you wanna put the power to euthanize people in the hands of the state, and the answer to that is most definitely 100% not. Well, I mean, absolutely. I would say if the Canadian government can’t work out how to organize the banking system or- Or passport delivery. Or passport delivery or some of the roads, I don’t want to give them life and death, particularly not over mentally ill people. So when you see people suffering, I mean, I saw this in my clinical practice a lot, is that if you, and I saw this with my daughter, we talked to her too about this one because she was very, very ill as a child. And we did everything we could to stop her from being bitter. And the reason for that, and this is an interesting, it forces an interesting consideration of the relationship between facts and values. So she had 40 deteriorating joints and each of them were painful. And that’s a lot of joints and that’s a lot of pain. And that was only a few of the things that were wrong with her. But had she become resentful and bitter, then she would have had all those problems. Plus she would have been resentful and bitter. And as far as I can tell, the way you turn tragedy into hell is by becoming resentful and bitter. Now, here’s a fact value problem. So you tell me what you think about this. So she could have said to me, dad, given the facts at hand, the logical conclusion to derive, so that’s an induction, let’s say, the logical conclusion to derive is that, life is terrible and unjust and it would be irrational of me not to be bitter. And I think, and this is the conundrum that you see in Job too, is that, when you set up a story so that someone loses everything, you set up the story so that they have lost everything. And the conclusion to derive from the loss of everything, the logical conclusion seems to me almost pro forma, given that you’ve lost everything, is that you have every right to shake your fist at the sky. Whether you’re feeling stressed or anxious, or simply seeking a moment of peace and tranquility, the Halo app has something for you. Halo offers an incredible range of guided meditations and prayers that are designed to help you deepen your spirituality and strengthen your connection to God. 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Halo.com slash Jordan for an exclusive three-month free trial of all 10,000 plus prayers and meditations. The oddity of it, and the oddity is, you know, about resentful people or bitter people is that, and again, it’s a point I’ve made a lot since The Wall in the West came out, is we are, I think we probably all have the same experience, everyone watching and you and I, which is we’ve probably all come across very bitter and resentful people in our lives who seem to have quite a good lot. I mean, for instance, who are financially secure. Yeah. I suspect we’ve also come across people who seem to have, who have nothing materially or otherwise, who live lives of gratitude and great grace. Those are the people that really strike you. Those are the people that really strike you when you meet, I’m not so sure. Absolutely, but one of the reasons I’m interested in this is because it seems fascinating to me that you can have an attitude which every socioeconomic thing doesn’t actually matter. You know, if you’re a resentful person and you’re given a million dollars tomorrow, you will be a resentful person the day after or the week after as well. This isn’t gonna make any difference. Well, so does that imply, see, this is, I’m trying to wrestle with the distinction, let’s say between faith and reason, let’s say. And so like, it seems to me, first of all, I don’t think faith is the willingness to believe in superstitious nonsense for which there’s no evidence. Which is the definition that has mainly written through the last few days. Yes, exactly. But I think faith is a decision to act in courage and trust. And I think it’s a decision to make that a practice. And I think in some ways it’s a decision to make that a practice, God damn it, regardless of the evidence. So, you know, I have a friend who was brutally tortured in a Canadian residential school when he was a kid. And you can’t listen to what happened to him without it like tearing, you can’t listen to it. It’s unbelievably brutal and awful, you know? And he was devastated by that and was on the street for a good while drinking and doing drugs and like tearing himself into pieces. And he had great grandparents who really loved him. And he was an inheritor of his cultural tradition, a genuine inheritor. And so he made a decision that he wasn’t going to live a bitter and resentful life, that he certainly wasn’t going to pay that catastrophe forward with his children. He learned to play, he learned to look at himself in the mirror again, you know? And he’s conducted himself as a good man for decades now. And that’s, you already made the case, you know, that you see people who have everything in some real sense and who are bitter and resentful nonetheless. And then you see people who have nothing who aren’t. And so you can take the same set of facts or even an opposing set of facts and derive different conclusions. And this points at the fact value problem, right? Is that the facts don’t speak for themselves in some deterministic manner. And it seems to me that there has to be something approximating something we’ve always defined as a leap of faith in the positive direction. And that’s tied to, it’s tied in a strange way to something you said earlier, which is that, you know, there are shallow pleasures and meanings and deep pleasures and meanings. And the proper faith is faith in the deep pleasures and meanings. Yes, and I’d add one other thing to that, which is, and the faith, the recognition of the depth is telling you something. Yeah, well, so I’ve been trying to puzzle through what depth means, technically, let’s say. So in the scientific literature, your work is more, is deeper, that’s one way of thinking about it, the more other people cite it. So it’s a dependency network, right? So here’s the definition of depth. More ideas are dependent on a deep idea than the number of ideas that are dependent on a shallow idea. So it’s like criticality, right? So you can imagine a web of presumptions with some presumptions at the fundament. Okay, so I think that religious axioms are the deepest fundaments. And I think that we could say that by definition. And here’s part of the reason. At the very least, they speak to the deepest fundament. Well, but I think that’s part of, and this is where it gets complex again, that’s part of the evidentiary structure. You know, if you have a profound aesthetic sense of depth, you can see that there are some things that move you deeply. So some things move you deeply. And in principle, those are profound things. The reason they move you deeply is because they shift large sections of your perceptual and conceptual structure simultaneously, rather than the shallow things which are evanescent and irrelevant. And so, and I think as well that we do in fact, feel movement in the depths. And that’s why music as an art form is so extraordinary because it speaks to a depth that speech can’t do. [“Symphony No. 5 in D Major, Op. 16, No. 5 in D Major”]